E3 Wiki Guide

E3 2003

Just as DOOM 3 was the big game of the show in 2002, Half-Life 2 fired up everybody's imagination in 2003. Shown in a slightly larger theater than the one used for DOOM 3, Half-Life had the most buzz, the longest lines, and ended the show with all the big awards.

Half-Life 2 was amazing. It had the most advanced physics anyone had ever seen. It had great graphics in wide-open settings. The look was not as spectacular as DOOM 3's overall look, but it was more ambitious. DOOM 3 was more dark halls and claustrophobic settings. Half-Life 2 had entire cities.

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Some of Half-Life 2 looked too good to be true. As it turned out, it was possibly too good to be true. In the months after the show, evidence arose suggesting that some of the amazing things shown in the demo were actually scripted events.

The irony is that when id unveiled DOOM 3, people said, "Too good to be true. Must be scripted." It wasn't. With Half-Life 2, no one questioned the demo.

Half-Life 2 was only one of many big sequels unveiled in 2003. Microsoft ended its pre-E3 press conference with a movie of Halo 2. The audience went wild. Sony showed a trailer for Gran Turismo 4 and the audience went wild. The only sequel you did not hear much about was DOOM 3. After building up so much buzz, id went silent. People hoped to see a finished DOOM 3 by the end of 2002, then by the end of 2003. The game was not released until August of 2004.

At E3, 2003, DOOM 3 was little more than video streaming on a couple of television monitors. E3 2003 was the show for ultra-agile wall-crawlers. Sure, Activision had Spider-Man 2 for every platform it could think of. But there were new suspects, too. Ubisoft had resurrected the Prince of Persia franchise, giving it superb new look with vibrant 3D scenes and immaculate storytelling. The new Prince could scamper across wall Jacky Chan-style. Ubisoft converted the old run-'n-jump game into a puzzle game in which players had to figure out how to get from Point A to Point B.

Tecmo created a new wall-crawler too, Ninja Gaiden. Tecmo's ninja had the same jumping and wall-walking abilities, but he was more combat oriented.

One thing stood out about the press conferences in 2003, they were deplorable. Sony had the best press conference. As always, Sony was loud and long and flashy. After Sony Computer Entertainment America CEO Kaz Hirai finished talking about online strategies, upcoming games, and how badly Sony was beating the competition; Ken Kutaragi took the stage and announced plans for a new handheld game system call PlayStation Portable.

This announcement left the audience speechless -- but not nearly as speechless as it left Nintendo. Sony had done it again. Sony had slipped into E3 smuggling a huge surprise under the radar and completely humiliated a competitor. The Nintendo press conference, which took place immediately after the Sony conference, was an utter disaster.

Nintendo was simply caught off guard. They were enjoying incredible success with their new Game Boy Advance SP and had no reason to think that GBA would not have the same kind of 10-year shelf life enjoyed by their first Game Boy. Suddenly Nintendo executives were asked to respond to a challenge they had possibly never even considered.

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Other things went wrong as well. Nintendo had Zelda Four Swords, and that went over well; but Shigeru Miyamoto's big demonstration in 2003 was a multiplayer Pac-Man game in which players could control the ghosts. Sure, it was neat. It was too old school and too small.

Sony and Microsoft were going full-bore Internet at the time. Nintendo's response was "connectivity." Nintendo executives wanted to exploit the Game Boy/GameCube connection. It was a tough sell. You never want to describe events with superlatives; but if there was a worst E3 press conference of all-time, it was the Nokia conference at E3 2003. The show began with a bunch of totally suburban kids dancing around on a stage trying to do the Finnish version American hip-hop. It looked bad.

Bad went to worse, however, when a couple of enormous and dower Finnish executives strolled into the middle of the crowd looking like secret service agents. The kids melted from the stage as the mean-looking executives began touting their N-Gage mobile phone/game system.

The demonstration went on and on and nothing went right. Some of the games did not work. The ones that worked, Tomb Raider for instance, looked really, really ugly or really, really old-school. There was simply no reason to want an N-Gage.

Then the big, mean-looking Nokia executives said they would show game footage of a new WWII game and showed full-motion video -- grainy full-motion video.

"How much would you pay for this?" one of the big, mean-looking Finnish executives asked. It sounded like a commercial for Kinsu carving knives.

As he said this, a girl who probably was over 20 but did not look a day over 13 years of age came walking on to the stage. The big, mean-looking, Finnish Nokia executive seemed to ignore her as she swayed coquettishly beside him.

"How much would you pay for this great system?" the big, mean-looking but very clean-cut Finnish Nokia executive repeated.

This time, the girl removed her top. Don't worry. She had a bikini top underneath it. No arrests were made. She had the number $299 scrawled across her stomach in big red letters. It was the biggest photo-op of E3 2003.

They say you can tell how serious companies are about their games by the size of the shrimp they serve at their E3 parties. Nokia had a small card table with cookies at that conference. And no, I am not making that up.